Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www. million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: the rectitude and wisdom and faithfulness of the divine procedure. Confronted with baffling providences, the reason of which perplexes our best ingenuity, we are tempted at times to ask, ' Why these unanswered-nay, defeated prayers? the urgent plea not only left unheard, but responded to in Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www. million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: the rectitude and wisdom and faithfulness of the divine procedure. Confronted with baffling providences, the reason of which perplexes our best ingenuity, we are tempted at times to ask, ' Why these unanswered-nay, defeated prayers? the urgent plea not only left unheard, but responded to in the way we most dreaded and deprecated-the circuitous route " by the way of the wilderness," instead of the short and apparently safe one direct to Canaan.' To take an illustration not inappropriate to the words of our motto-verse, many a mother pleads in earnest supplication that God may overrule events and arrangements so as to prevent her son going to some place-some " city of habitation " that might too surely prove a position of peril or temptation. How is her prayer at times answered? Her child is sent to the distant, dreaded city, instead of being continued under the fostering influences and salutary restraints of home. In silence and solitude, and under the bitter consciousness of frustrated wishes, she is driven to give way to the plaintive soliloquy, " Surely my way is hid from the Lord, and my judgment is passed over from my God." So thought and reasoned an illustrious name in the roll of Christian parents-Monica, the devout mother of Augustine. He tells us in his " Confessions " that she had besought earnestly-pleaded night and day-that the God she served would not permit her son to fulfil his own wish and intention of leaving his home and going to Italy. She too truly feared the vices and contaminations of the Roman capital. Yet her prayers were not heard. To Italy he went, and in Rome he sojourned; and the yearning heart he had left behind could only picture, in her hours of lone agony, the moral shipwreck of all that was dearest to Books, Law~~Essays, Palms-of-Elim-Or-Rest-and-Refreshment-in-the-Valleys~~John-R-Macduff, 999999999, Palms of Elim: Or Rest and Refreshment in the Valleys (1879), John Ross Macduff, 1437120784, Kessinger Publishing Company, , , , , Kessinger Publishing Company